A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

Environment

  • Climate and conservation

    This article in today’s Post discusses how people responsible for wildlife conservation are having to change their approach because of global warming. The old model, where you set aside a certain fixed area of land to protect the wildlife within it, is becoming obsolete as changes in the climate will, or are already, driving those Read more

  • Just say nein!

    The president of the German government’s advisory body on environmental issues has suggested that, for environmental reasons, Germans should cut back their meat consumption to “prewar” levels and strive for a diet more like the Italians. Predictable attacks from industry about trying to deny consumers “freedom of choice” follow. (Via the–somewhat unfortunately named, given the Read more

  • Not bad for week one

    Obama gives military’s interrogation rules to CIA (More here from NRCAT.) Obama orders CIA prisons, Gitmo shut Obama blocks some of Bush’s last-minute environmental decisions More of this, please. Read more

  • One world?

    I recently read Peter Singer’s One World: The Ethics of Globalization, which was originally delivered as a series of lectures in 2000. I had a longish post in the hopper about national loyalties and obligations to strangers, but it didn’t really go anywhere so I junked it. Suffice it to say, I don’t always agree Read more

  • Cooking with ATR

    Jennifer’s post here makes me think that this sort of thing might actually be interesting or useful to some folks. One of the most common questions I get as a vegetarian is “What do you eat?” I chalk this up to a couple of things. One is that, for many people, the standard American meal, Read more

  • Bittman on our meat-guzzling way of life

    Readers of the previous post might be interested in this talk from Mark Bittman: “What’s wrong with what we eat.” His story will be familiar to people who follow these issues, but it’s a good primer. Bittman makes a big deal out of the meat issue (rightly, IMO) and the impact that our levels of Read more

  • The anti-foodies’ foodie

    Salon has an informative review of Mark Bittman’s new manifesto/cook book Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating. Bittman is the author of several cookbooks and writes for the NYT, including the “Minimalist” column about cooking. The reviewer, Laura Miller, calls Bittman the “anti-foodies’ foodie” and describes his book as an application of Michael Pollan’s Read more

  • On Vilsack

    Jennifer asks what I think of Obama’s pick of Tom Vilsack for Secretary of Agriculture. Doesn’t she know that the question of who gives the invocation at the inauguration is much more pressing than our country’s food system? Sheesh! I only know what I’ve read, and the general impression I get is that Vilsack is Read more

  • 2008: The year in book blogging

    I’m not going to provide a best books of the year list, but here’s a sampling of those that got their hooks into me enough to generate some more or less in-depth blogging (needless to say, most of these weren’t published in 2008): Andrew Bacevich, The Limits of Power “Empire of dysfunction” Evelyn Pluhar, Beyond Read more

  • Pre-Christmas odds and ends

    The ATR household is off to visit family for the better part of the next week, so blogging will be light–well, even lighter than usual. Here’s a sampling of what I’ve been reading ’round the Web lately: Christopher has several posts on l’affaire Rick Warren that are, as usual, very much worth your time. (See Read more